The province must appeal ruling striking down lawyers' oath to the King

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One of the most basic expectations of citizenship is loyalty to the Canadian state. Well, unless you’re an orthodox Sikh.

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This is the broader principle you can draw from a recent Alberta Court of Appeal decision, which concluded that requiring individuals to swear an oath of allegiance to the sovereign is an infringement upon religious freedom and a violation of the right to racial and religious equality. Until Tuesday, it was the rule in Alberta that new lawyers swear such an oath — which made sense, considering that being called to the bar makes one an officer of the court in a constitutional monarchy.

Courts, it must be remembered, aren’t freestanding entities that came from nothing. They were created by the King when the number of disputes in his realm became personally unmanageable. He created courts and appointed judges to decide matters that came before them in his stead. Courts serve, and are an outgrowth of, the Crown. It’s completely reasonable to expect officers of the court to swear loyalty to the entity at the heart of the system.

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This became a problem when Prabjot Singh Wirring, an orthodox Sikh, decided that the Alberta oath would interfere with his religion. In 2022, he wanted a licence to practice in the province, but he took issue with the wording of the requisite oath to “be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her heirs and successors, according to law.”

Despite being born in Edmonton, and having lived his life in Canada, he wouldn’t swear that he would “bear true allegiance” to the Crown and thus the Canadian state. As an orthodox Sikh, he had sworn an oath to his god, Akal Purakh, which he said took........

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